Mark Boulton

8 Responses to “Design, CSS and bandwidth theft UPDATE”

1. 
   James Archer said on: June 20th, 2005 at 10:57 pm

   You know, I think I’ve had every single plagar­ist I’ve caught tell me that it was “one of their guys” and that they were going to severely rep­rim­and or fire him.  

   I guess that’s the industry-standard way to save face. :)

2. 
   Mark Boulton said on: June 20th, 2005 at 11:03 pm

   I think what promp­ted the guy to con­tact me wasn’t my polite email a few weeks ago, but the fact that if you googled his com­pany name, my blog post came top along with all of the col­our­ful comments. 

   Made me smile :-)

3. 
   Dio said on: June 21st, 2005 at 12:13 am

   Are, the joys of a good blog post on a blog so well optim­ized that it out ranks the source site… 

   Maybe they should employ you to get their site a bit bet­ter sor­ted in the search engines ;)

4. 
   Sam Sugar said on: June 21st, 2005 at 8:54 am

   Mark,

   I’m 100% on your side. I would have leased the hounds on them. The hounds being ‘Big’ Vern and ‘Knee­caps’ O’Riley. 

   That said — as the owner of a com­pany, I can con­cieve of an employee doing this. If I found out I’d talk to them and fire them. What could I tell you to save face though?  Short of nam­ing them not much I guess.

   Inter­est­ing prob­lem. Per­haps a descrip­tion of how it happened or why the theft wasn’t recognized… 

   I think I’d try to meet you in per­son in an effort to prove my sin­cer­ity if it was a huge ker­fuffle. Maybe post an explin­a­tion and apo­logy along with the redesign. 

   Any bet­ter ideas?

5. 
   Paul said on: June 21st, 2005 at 5:08 pm

   To be hon­est there’s noth­ing you can do other than take their word for it, unless you want to take the mat­ter fur­ther (e.g. charge them for the band­width costs involved). At the end of the day you don’t know whether they’re telling the truth or not so you just have to give them the bene­fit of the doubt, even if that makes you feel like you’re going easy on them.

   If you think “it was someone who no longer works here” is a bad excuse, I’ve also had the excel­lent “well, I thought if I put ‘writ­ten by (author name)’ at the bot­tom of the art­icle it would be okay” as an excuse for repost­ing one of my tutori­als on a site. 

   As an aside, if I try and right click on the Gravatar link next to the email address field, the text dis­ap­pears in Fire­fox — a bit annoy­ing because it means I can’t open it in a new tab (same thing hap­pens if I try the Option+LMB shortcut).

6. 
   Gustavo Caetano said on: June 22nd, 2005 at 10:53 am

   Inter­st­ing excuse that one. Very original! 

   Oddly enough, It was quite the same I used when a Sony’s law­yer called me about my Old­boy shar­ing at Bittorrent ^^

7. 
   humbug said on: June 22nd, 2005 at 11:30 am

   Its inter­est­ing to hear you com­plain about theft when it hap­pens to you but you hap­pily steal dia­grams from Robert Bring­hurst. — At least you then accep­ted the fact and gave credit where it was due after it was poin­ted out in the com­ments in another post. Glass Ceil­ings and all.

8. 
   Mark Boulton said on: June 22nd, 2005 at 11:45 am

   hum­bug — Nor­mally I wouldn’t reply to such a com­ment but let me set the record straight. 

   That dia­gram was not stolen from Bring­hurst. If you were even remotely edu­cated in typo­graphic design you would know that Bring­hurst was recre­at­ing well estab­lished typo­graphic and type­set­ting the­ory with that dia­gram, which is pre­cisely what I was doing. I simply presen­ted it in a way sim­ilar to his, which is why Joe rightly poin­ted out that I should credit him, which I did. 

   I don’t take kindly to being called a thief, espe­cially by someone who leaves anon details. I’d rather have con­duc­ted this dis­cus­sion on email.